On Criticism

With the release of Michael has come a storm of reviews, all this past week. Michael garnered two five-star reviews, Airel took down one of those plus a couple of one-star scorchers, and I’ve heard back from various people and fans through unofficial channels on some of my other works, like K: [phantasmagoria]. All of it has combined into a critical wave that has given cause for pause. I took a walk last night, reflecting on all of it.

I want to touch on the subject of Bad Reviews here. It’s something all published authors have to deal with, and it’s something arguably made worse by technology—anyone and everyone that wants to can leave poisonous black barbs in the creative part of the author’s heart, and at a whim. I’ve seen quite a lot of it. One of my favorites was a young lady’s one-star review that must have been ten paragraphs long, poorly written natch, at the end of which she basically said she was on her period in finals week so she probably shouldn’t be writing reviews while she’s in a bad mood and isn’t it funny, lol! Yeah well. Pardon me for not laughing. And perhaps I used the term “lady” too loosely. I’ll leave that to you to judge.

I’m not bitching. That’s first. I’m not. I can take the bad with the good. I have to. And while I wish there weren’t so much bad and so much eagerness on the part of readers (or jealous authors?) to launch it at me and others like me, I have a right to say something about those bad reviews. For my fellow author, I have a responsibility to address the elephant in the room, because nobody tells you how to deal with bad criticism when you’re setting out on your journey. Too often, we authors set out on that journey with rose-colored glasses anyway, only to have them ripped from our faces at various points as cold reality shoulders its way into our lives.

Here’s the thing: I know I still have a lot to learn about writing. Perhaps some of my one-star reviewers think I’m haughtily earning millions as I scourge the market with tepid mass market drivel. “Get an editor!” they say, not realizing that I devoted more than two years of my life to the project, not realizing that me and my family made sacrifices to be able to afford the $4k+ bill our incredible editor sent us. It was all worth it, by the way. My critics may not realize that I sat at book signings skimming the print version of the First Edition, finding errors, resolving to go back through and find them and fix them for the Second Edition, which is already on sale. Perhaps my more disaffected reviewers are just pissed that I’m able to make a living as a writer, full time. Maybe they’re jealous, though I can’t imagine why. Truthfully. I’ve seen my life. It’s not ready for prime time. I’m not going to be featured on MTV Cribs anytime soon.

Nevertheless, I’m in a bit of a storm here, and I’m trying to figure out what makes the one-star critic tick. Let’s play devil’s advocate for a sec: Usually, at least on Amazon, for some magical reason all the five-star reviews are some kind of conspiracy against True Art. In other words, they’re meaningless because obviously, the author has a huge network of minions who do his bidding in regard to reviews. This gang of indiscriminate five-star reviewing superfriends boasts perfect Tom Selleck moustaches, you can bet, and they are well supplied with three dollar bills by us rich author types, so that they can buy our eBooks again and again and again, thus sending our crummy unworthy books up the rankings undeservedly. Anyway, if all this were true, and the five-star review should be ignored because it’s so obviously skewed, then all one-star reviews ought to share the same fate. Hell, we learned about bell curves and means and medians in junior high, for crying out loud. Why not apply it here.

There’s been a lot of assumption in our culture, too, about what “Mainstream” is. On the conservative side, there has been name calling. Conservatives label the traditional powers in the press the MSM, or Main Stream Media, but that’s a misnomer. NBC and CNN aren’t mainstream. Hollywood tree huggers aren’t mainstream. Eco-terrorists aren’t mainstream, and “artists” who defecate into jars and then display it in galleries aren’t mainstream. What’s mainstream in America is by and large a Biblical sense of morality, a Christian outlook on how the world should work.

As that relates to our stories, that means we like the kinds of books and movies where the bad guy loses and the good guy gets the girl. Why do you think Princess Bride is a classic? Because that’s what most people want. The best criticism I got about Airel this year was this: “A good light read.” Why? Because it means I’m on target to reach the largest audience, giving me the best chance for success and giving my art the widest distribution. Some people resent that. Some people possess a morality that goads them on to fight against the actual mainstream; they resent most of us as backward, rednecks, gun-toters, religious nut jobs, evil conservatives, or just plain old intolerant and uneducated idiots. But I think it’s plain to see who’s really intolerant.

Their kind of morality demands that they fight in shrill tones against any mention of God, any writing about Biblical scripture without some kind of apology or prequalification. Their view of true art is exclusive, it must be edgy, it must be “realistic” (i.e. hopeless and self-serving), it must contain ever more gratuitous sex, foul language, denigration of women, attacks on traditional values, and it must be a crutch to ever more extreme splinter groups and radical factions of our society—in short, they don’t believe all of us were created equal, their morality insists that we be forced to be equal. My writing is decidedly outside that mold.

I think that could be one reason why I must suffer the attack of the one-star review from time to time.

But what else might have filled my one-star reviewers with such angst, God love them? Allow me to posit another theory, based on how most of these are composed, because probably about 80% of all one-star reviews are filled with spelling and grammar errors. I submit to you the idea that they’re not themselves authors, or even writers. How many critics of literature have historically been writers? How many food critics are chefs? How many motorjournalists, who eagerly criticize the iron they test drive, have ever worked the manufacturing lines, have ever set foot in a design studio, are able to engineer a car? I think it’s reasonable to say that it’s easy for a connoisseur of food to criticize the chef, especially when he doesn’t know how to cook the dish. I’m not trying to insult you, one-star critic, but I think it’s a fair question to ask: have you ever written and published a book? If not, do you think it’s intellectually honest for you to ask again and again, “Howe does this carp git pulbished?” I think it’s a question that begs an answer.

All my books have errors in them. I am trying to find them all, but it’s difficult to ferret them out from the hundreds of thousands of words in which they’re buried. For example, I just read Rainbow Six, by Tom Clancy this past week, and I found errors in it. I found turns of phrase that I would never use. I came across bits of writing that struck me as awkward, but I loved the book. I realized that it took Clancy probably a couple of years to put that one together. Lots of people had their hands on it, trying to make it all work right. It does. All that work, and I digested all 738 pages in a week, easily. It’s striking to the point of filling me with reverence for the man. And though my tastes as a writer are different than his, I won’t be blasting him with a one-star review on it. No way.

I have to admit something. If I’m hurt by one- and two-star reviews on my own work, I should be more careful criticizing others’ artistic expressions. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I should be more careful. If I’m standing before a work that doesn’t speak to me, that doesn’t mean the work is crap. It just means it doesn’t’ speak to me. I should move on. It may not be a case of bad art. It may be a case of bad taste. Or at the least, missed opportunity.

I humbly state here that I am not finished. I am still learning how to write. I love that I have loyal fans, I love that there are people out there who get what I’m trying to do, that I’m able to connect with somebody through my art. I know I won’t be able to connect with everyone. My art won’t speak to all to read it. Some won’t get it. Others will be repulsed by it. The reaction will be different every time. But what momma taught you, or should have taught you, about not saying anything if you can’t say something nice, holds true here. If you’ve got a negative reaction to the work, don’t hold the worker responsible for your reaction. A truly free society needs no police.

In the end, I write because I choose to, and I write about what I want to write about. And how. I take all the risks on publishing it, too, knowing full well that I will bear the wounds of the critic’s arrows. I could hide my work under a rock, but I don’t want to. I want to share it. I have to give some weight to the criticism I receive, but I also know what I’m trying to do here. If I were swayed by these breezes, I wouldn’t be worthy of the mantle God gave me. There’s probably nothing worse than a man who abdicates his life’s pursuits to the whims of popular sentiment. Bill Clinton was that kind of president. I’m not that kind of man.

So, to my fans: fear not. I will continue to write what you love. I will continue to learn my craft and hone excellence into all that I do. Thank you for your undying support.

And to my critics: I humbly thank you for your input. You’re entitled to your one-star opinions. All I ask of you is that you remember and consider, as you criticize me, that I’m an artist who takes my work seriously, who labors over it, who tries to make it as good as I can, not only for my fans, but also for little ol’ me. As such, please consider how you’d feel if someone said those things about your work. If you indeed have any work. If you do, please feel free to send me the links to it, so I can read it in turn, and give you my unsolicited opinion on it. I do believe that’s what would be considered “fair.”

On the Rebuttal

I’ve written rebuttals before. Mostly they’re about revenge, to most people, and they used to be about that for me, but I have since grown up. Much like Les Edgerton, who seems, though I don’t know him apart from his digital persona, like a grownup as well. I prefer grownups, for the record. I tend to distance myself from people with childish attributes unless they’re actual children.

Thank God, then, for maturity, which is one of the things this has been all about. If you’re grabbing for clues, let me toss you one: I’m talking about my original piece on writing in the present tense, Center Code, and the subsequent rebuttal piece that Les so graciously allowed me to publish last week. This is the followup to all of that cerebral verbosity.

So feel free to tune out if you’re a casual observer.

I just want to address a few things about what Les said in regard to my original post. The examples of prose that he demolished were entirely my own. In fairness to me, they were not written with any degree of consideration beyond rough illustration. They weren’t taken from any other work. They were custom-belched for that blog; save the last example, which was taken from K: phantasmagoria, my upcoming novel. The criticism he gave me on that was admittedly painful for a moment, but it made sense: I can do better.

That’s the primary perspective I want to share about this whole thing; that criticism is a tool to be used, not a weapon wielded toward destruction. Ideally. How it turns out is entirely up to You The Writer. You decide how to look at it. I’m choosing to use it as an opportunity, personally.

Now, on to my defense. This is a sticky wicket, because I have a considered reason for wanting to write in present tense that I can’t reveal. K: phantasmagoria pivots on it in a major way. It’s an experiment that I want to keep pure because I want to get raw and unfiltered reactions to it upon release. So I have to be careful what I say here and trust that Dear Reader has the desire to hang in there with me. But trust me, I’m not just doing it to appear different.

No, part of me is doing it because I just want to (figuratively) raise the middle finger to the rules-makers. I feel I know enough of the rules to make my own now. That could be dangerously hubristic, I know, and I see the contradiction inherent, trust me. But I’m one to do what I want to do, and just because, once my mind is set, and it is in this case. I think I have good reasons too, but I can’t share them all, as I said.

I don't know if I've yet said this in regard to present tense vs. past tense writing, but for me, there's a believeability issue in stories written with past tense narrative and present tense dialogue. Les asserts that we all assume that the story has already happened. Two things with this: One, I think his assumption about that assumption is kinda fallacious and uses the broad brush. Two, if the story has already happened, am I reasonably expected to believe that the storyteller was able to remember all the dialogue that happened from then to now verbatim? I think if we're going to go down that road then we ought to carry the train of thought all the way through to its logical conclusion, and to me, it makes more sense arguing in favor of present tense and Center Code. Logically, writing an entire book in past tense is like writing a novel that is in its entirety a flashback.

On that point: I didn’t get the memo on flashbacks. I mean I was suspicious of them in general, but I didn’t know that the rules provide that the first sentence only is written in past perfect and the rest in plain vanilla past. Anyway, I don’t really like that solution. It feels like a Band-Aid. It could be because I’ve read mostly non-fiction for entertainment. It could also be that my tastes in fiction run toward Arthur Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft and Jane Austen and Rudyard Kipling and Bram Stoker. And don't confuse my love of these past tense books for a love of the past tense.

But all this in turn could explain my penchant for semicolons. I like ‘em. I think they have a defined and unique purpose that imputes a certain meaning to the phrase they modify. I don’t think em dashes are a good replacement for them. Em dashes, as far as I've ever heard, are to be used more often to set off parenthetical phrases. But I like my dictionaries aged to one hundred years or more, so I may be behind the times myself. The point: I’m on board the flashback-hating bandwagon. I think they’re way overused these days, and show either lack of forethought on the part of the writer or plain laziness and/or ignorance. I’m plenty ignorant all on my own as well, and don’t think I don’t know it. But I firmly believe flashbacks need a damn good reason to be considered, let alone used.

Here’s the deal: what I’m getting at with my Center Code theory is that I want to try to make a book feel more like a movie, like something that’s playing out on the screen. I want it to feel like it’s happening now, like it’s unfolding right in front of me, like I’m part of it, like it's bespoke and custom-made and intense and real. I don’t feel like that when I read mass market fiction these days. Maybe I’m not reading the right books. Maybe I’ve got a lot left to learn (bingo!). But dammit, this is something I want to try, and try my own way. Let the readers decide. Let the reviews come rolling in. Let the winds of publicity howl. Let the pot be stirred, and let it be known that I’m the one stirring it; it won’t bother me. And let the masses buy the book, he he he. I shan’t discourage such things. And while we're on the topic of stirring, thanks again to Les Edgerton for a stirring discussion. Here's to more.